Reading this book is like the academic equivalent of watching a
cat fight, or perhaps RAW professional wrestling on the television
Monday nights. Barbara Fuchs takes on no less a heavyweight than
Stephen Greenblatt and wins. Personally, I’m cheering her on.

Normally, I would not leap immediately to the last chapter while
reviewing a scholarly book. But this volume turns enough received
assumptions on their end that somehow, that strategy seems
appropriate in this case. So let’s start at the end.

In the bold final chapter of her book—which is the closest thing
this slender tome has to a conclusion—Professor Fuchs unmasks
Greenblatt’s Cardenio Project as an intellectually dishonest,
opportunistic piece of showmanship with no other real purpose or
effect than to further the career of its founder. The sheer fraud
factor here is palpable: how could Professor Greenblatt market as
derived from Shakespeare a plot which he clearly borrowed from
Cervantes? And why would references made to Miguel de Cervantes in
the propaganda for his project, purportedly designed to acknowledge
some degree of indebtedness, instead send the reader on a wild
goose chase by allusion to the wrong part of
Cervantes’s lengthy two-volume novel? The reader can only conclude
that there is a shocking amount of confusion here, or else some
(perhaps deliberate) obfuscation. Either way, one has to ask: what
in the world is going on?

At this point perhaps a little background is in order.
Cardenio is not merely tangential to the book being
reviewed here; in fact, two out of five chapters deal with this
“lost” Shakespeare play allegedly based upon Spanish source
material. Stephen Greenblatt’s Cardenio Project was an effort
first, to collaborate with a living playwright (as Shakespeare was
thought to have done with John Fletcher?) to produce a modern-day
recreation of this “lost” work, and then, to commission additional
plays from playwrights all over the world whose productions would
be funded if they conformed to certain predetermined
specifications. Think the dramatic equivalent of that child’s game
of telephone.

As with so many of Greenblatt’s projects, there’s a germ of
genius in it, really. The idea that we should study textual
transmission by replicating the circumstances under which
Renaissance collaboration occurred sounds, at the outset,
incredibly fresh and innovative. But even Renaissance authors often
made at least some token effort to give credit where credit was
due. The problem is that Greenblatt claims to recreate Shakespeare,
except he really recreates Cervantes, whom he barely mentions, and
when he does, he does not even manage to cite the right source for
his borrowings. His new play is based upon the interpolated tale
“El curioso impertinente,” which does not form a part of the
Cardenio episode at all. One wonders: did he bother to reread
Don Quijote before sallying forth on this bold
adventure?

Curiosity, even of the pertinent sort, hardens to consternation
once the realization dawns that this ill-conceived journey was not
his maiden voyage into Spanish-language material. No less
opportunistic, perhaps, was his decision to capitalize upon the
Columbus quincentennial in 1992 with a book titled Marvelous
Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991). When asked
about some of the primary sources he used for that study, including
early chronicles and accounts penned by conquistadores, this
Shakespeare professor responded honestly that his Spanish was a
little wobbly. Not that this stopped him…one can only admire his
audacity before becoming perturbed at the question of how far we
dare trust his conclusions.

Now all of this chicanery suits Barbara Fuchs and her purposes
in The Poetics of Piracy to a T. Her real objective in
this book, as in her earlier Exotic Nation (which I
also reviewed for this journal), is to lay bare the subtle biases
and anti-Hispanic prejudice of scholars like Greenblatt who are
writing today. Their “occlusion” of Spanish source material, she
argues, actually replicates an inherited Renaissance dynamic by
which England pillaged Spain’s literary riches in the same way that
Francis Drake pillaged her treasure ships. This is a violent new
account of literary history, albeit a convincing one. Her method
bears within...

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